It's been about 8 months since we launched Google Chrome. Aside from exclaiming how fast it is, users have been sending us lots of feedback and feature requests. We've increased our focus on speed and also added some of the most-requested features. Some of these improvements made it into the Beta version that we first released in March, and we've continued to improve the Beta since then. Today, we are moving the Beta version to the stable channel for all users to enjoy.

Here are some improvements that you'll notice right away:

Improved New Tab Page: The most requested feature from users was the ability to remove thumbnails from the New Tab page. Now you can finally hide that embarrassing gossip blog from the Most Visited section.

Full Screen Mode: If you've ever given a presentation or watched a large video using Google Chrome, you might have wished you could use every last pixel on your screen for the content. Now you can hide the title bar and the rest of the browser window by hitting F11 or selecting the option in the Tools menu.

Form Autofill: Filling out your information in forms over and over again can be tedious. Form autofill helps by showing information you've previously entered into the same form fields automatically. If at any point you want to clear out your information, that's easy to do from the Tools menu.

And here are some improvements that aren't immediately visible, but will make web browsing with Google Chrome more enjoyable:

Increased Stability: Google Chrome is more stable than ever--we have fixed over 300 bugs that caused crashes since launch.

Increased Speed: Making the web faster continues to be our main area of focus. Thanks to a new version of WebKit and an update to our JavaScript engine, V8, interactive web pages will run even faster. We've also made sure that JavaScript keeps running fast even when you have lots of tabs open. Try opening a bunch of web applications and then running your favorite benchmark. You can read more about V8 in our JavaScript scalability post on the Chromium blog.

To hear more about these improvements, check out the following video by Product Manager, Brian Rakowski:

If you're already using Google Chrome, you'll be automatically updated to this new version soon. If you're new or if you're itching to try this right away, you can get the latest version at google.com/chrome.

Finally, a note on version numbers: we're referring to this as Chrome 2, but that's mainly a metric to help us keep track of changes internally. We don't give too much weight to version numbers and will continue to roll out useful updates as often as possible.

If you're an IT administrator, you may be interested to know that today, on the Open Source blog, we announced a way to manage the update cycle for Google Chrome via Google Update for Administrators. This means that administrators are now able to specify how often to check for updates, how applications should be updated, and whether to allow installation of certain applications.